Brooks Koepka won his 5th Major on Sunday after bludgeoning Oak Hill (and the field.. and the #haters.. and me) with his aggressive, yet disciplined, style of play. In the end it was a patented "Major Koepka" performance but once again we didn't really see it coming.

Last week we published a plot visualizing the skill distribution of the past three decades of Major Champions. Heading into the 2023 PGA Championship, we estimated Koepka's skill to be just +1.0 strokes-gained (without course fit/major bumps), which places him—yet again—in the mid-to-lower section of the distribution. It continues the broader theme of Brooks routinely transcending his perceived skill level to win and contend at golf's biggest events.

After a brief hiatus, the mystery of Major Koepka lives on.

Does Did Oak Hill Play Favourites?

In our last newsletter we made an educated guess at the style of player Oak Hill might favor. Given its history of favoring accurate drivers, we thought–even with the redesign–that driving accuracy would play an important role in determining who finds success at Oak Hill.

We were wrong.

Last week we documented how the top 15 finishers in tournaments typically rank in terms of their driving distance and accuracy leading into the week. For a typical full-field PGA Tour event, the average distance rank of the Top 15 players on the leaderboard is 55.7, while for accuracy it’s 60.9. For PGA Championships, those figures are 50 and 64.3, respectively. Last week at Oak Hill, the top 15 finishers had an average pre-tournament driving distance rank of 41.1 and an average driving accuracy rank of 66.9.

We also ran the new Oak Hill data through our course fit model to make use of the full field in understanding course-player fit. The 2023 version of Oak Hill ranked 19th of 159 courses in the degree to which it favored driving distance, and just 143rd of 159 courses for driving accuracy. It ranked below average in how much it favored approach skill and short game skill.

Rankings Update

Scottie Scheffler returns to world #1 after a T2 finish—and a stumble from Jon Rahm—at the PGA Championship.

Top 10 (see all)
Player	DG		OWGR
Scottie Scheffler	1	1	1	1
Jon Rahm	2	1	2	1
Xander Schauffele	3	—	5	—
Patrick Cantlay	4	—	4	—
Rory McIlroy	5	1	3	—
Tony Finau	6	1	12	—
Tyrrell Hatton	7	1	18	1
Viktor Hovland	8	8	6	5
Sungjae Im	9	2	19	1
Cameron Smith	10	8	8	—
Notables
Tyrrell Hatton	7	1	18	1
Brooks Koepka	17	19	13	31
Tommy Fleetwood	20	3	23	—
Justin Rose	21	12	29	4
Shane Lowry	44	8	26	—
Victor Perez	72	36	59	7
Bryson DeChambeau	77	40	90	124
Ludvig Aberg (a)	80	9	—	—
Sepp Straka	114	52	34	6

Other than Brooks Koepka and Michael Block, Luke Donald might have been the happiest man leaving Oak Hill on Sunday night as 8 of the top 22 on the leaderboard were prospective members of his European Ryder Cup team. This, in tandem with a relatively poor week from the top American players, has increased their win probability in Rome by over 2 percentage points to 31.2%.

Player Feature

Brooks Koepka

age 33 yrs, 0 months

dg rank 17th — owgr rank 13th

weeks in dg top 100 459

dg skill +1.37 strokes-gained / round¹

style bomber, well-rounded

career wins
PGA Tour: 9
European Tour: 1
Challenge Tour: 4
Amateur: 3

player comps
2022 Tony Finau (similarity score²: 99.6)
2010 Geoff Ogilvy (96.9)
2017 Charl Schwartzel (96.5)

Letzig's Insight
What else is there to say about Koepka that hasn’t already been said? He’s just won his 5th major to stake his claim as the best player of the current generation. His top comps (which are based on strokes-gained data alone) provide another view into how different his major and non-major performances have been: 2022 Finau, 2010 Ogilvy, and 2017 Schwartzel were all solid players, but they aren’t anywhere near the generational-best conversations.

1 Relative to an average PGA Tour field.

2 Similarity scores are uniformly distributed from 0 (least similar) to 100 (most similar). Similarity is based on overall skill and playing style over the previous 3 seasons and a measure of career-long performance. Comps are restricted to players of the same age.

LIVing Plus

The 16 LIV golfers who teed it up in last week’s PGA Championship had a great week overall. Here is how their collective performance looked relative to our model’s expectations:

Expected Wins: 0.085, Actual Wins: 1 (Koepka)
Expected Top 5s: 0.6, Actual Top 5s: 2 (DeChambeau)
Expected Top 10s: 1.3, Actual Top 10s: 3 (Smith)
Expected Top 20s: 2.7, Actual Top 20s: 5 (Reed, Pereira)
Expected Made Cuts: 9.1, Actual Made Cuts: 11 (Varner III, Pieters, Burmester, Johnson, Mickelson, Kim)